The children in the face of Internet. The face of a virtual world has many aspects. The internet
helps in many areas of life, it seems indispensable in the military, banking, economy, social
information, education and even the contemporary Church cannot get rid of the evangelical and
informative activity in a global network. But the internet is not only a place of accessible services,
the most popular ones being WWW websites, electronic mail, Usenet, discussion lists or internet
cafes. It is also an environment full of traps and dangers, a ‘legal’, in the face of law, school
of ‘anti-education’ and spreading of ‘anti-values’, especially if we take into account the fact that
children and youth constitute the most devout and the most defenseless society of the internet
recipients. Unlimited access to pornography, vulgarity and violence linked with a lack of efficient
tools of controlling the website content, makes the internet a source of many examples of juvenile
pathological behavior. Some people claim that the formative influence of the media on education
competes on a rising scale with the influence of school, the Church and even a family. Benedict
XVI in his message for XLI Communications Day 2007 stresses that a relationship: children –
media – education should be considered from two perspectives: the formation of children by the
media and the formation of children to respond appropriately to the media. In this question the Pope
points at a specific interdependence between a responsibility of the media and a need of active and
critical attitude of media broadcast recipients. In this way a preparation for a responsible
exploitation of the media seems to be an important task for a cultural, moral and spiritual
development of children and youth. It is an extremely difficult task as it is clearly visible that the
internet addiction will become a genuine plague in the 21 century.
Key words: Internet, children, pornography, education